Hello, my name is Emily by Joy Lynn Goddard

Title: Hello, my name is Emily
Author: Joy Lynn Goddard
Average Price: $14.95
Publisher: Chestnut Publishing
Publication Date: March 2008
Number of Pages: 161

For a smart girl, Emily is planning to do something really stupid . . .

She’s mad at her mother. So what else is new? As a typical teenager, Emily wants a life, but her mother wants to ruin everything! She even treats the family dog better than she does Emily. Besides, she’s not even her real mother - Emily and Taylor, her brother, were adopted.

As Emily begins the search for her birth mother, she reaches a dead end, but then a man sends her an email that changes her life. She wants to meet him secretly. Her friend Alex warns her not to go because he thinks that cyberspace is full of creeps. But Emily doesn’t listen to him and heads into serious trouble.

Frantic, Alex tries his best to save her. Will he be too late?


I think I've said this before but the thing I like best about Joy Lynn Goddard's books is the reality of it. I love how she takes real life events and makes a wonderful story out of it. This novel was no exception.

The character's in this book are the same ones from Goddard's other books but in each of her novels she focuses on a different character and their story. This time the main character was Emily - an adopted girl who yearns to find her real mother.

I thought Emily's search to find her real mother was very realistic. What Emily thought were the boundaries between safe and unsafe were very similar to mine, and yet she still managed to find herself in trouble. The way the characters in this book spoke was also more realistic then the vocab in the author's previous books.

I don't know about you but I think the price for this book ($14.95) was a bit much. However, considering the publisher of this book is a bit on the small side, I see why it is a tad costly.

In the end, this novel is quite satisfying but I think that it may have a smidgen better if Joy played the romance card a bit later. But I forgot about that once I really got into this book. A.